The VLSI Symposia – one on technology and one on circuits – are among the most influential in the semiconductor industry. Three hugely important papers were presented – one on 14nm FD-SOI and two on 10nm SOI FinFETs – at the most recent symposia in Honolulu (9-13 June 2014). In fact, three out of four […]

A debate is raging over at SemiWiki following a post there entitled “Is SOI Really Less Expensive?” by Scotten Jones (you can read it here). Within just over 48 hours, about 30 comments were made, with heavy hitters on both sides of the fence weighing in. While the post itself is about manufacturing economics, the […]

Some years back, European research giant CEA-Leti made a major commitment to support FD-SOI, partnering with STMicroelectronics, Soitec and IBM. Now, with the big FD-SOI foundry announcement by Samsung and STMicroelectronics, Leti’s ready to bring its vast expertise to players throughout the value chain, right up through design integration. To learn more about the range […]

Following the big FD-SOI/EDA news, Synopsys has provided ASN with more details for designers. The Synopsys’ Galaxy Design Platform has been extended to support the Samsung-STMicroelectronics strategic agreement on 28nm FD-SOI (see press release here). They’ve covered all the bases, so that designers going to Samsung’s foundry services for […]

Samsung’s Senior Director Foundry Marketing Kelvin Low blogged enthusiastically about the recent Samsung-STMicroelectronics FD-SOI announcement on the company’s website. He has graciously agreed to let ASN repost it here – and says we’ll be hearing more from him in the future. Without further ado, here’s what he said: While 14nm FinFET is the darling […]

By Adele Hars, ASN Editor-in-Chief Speculation is mounting following ST’s April 28th announcement that they’d signed on a new first-tier foundry for 28nm FD-SOI manufacturing. As of this posting, they haven’t yet said which one it is. The social media-sphere is abuzz about the mystery foundry – with posters in LinkedIn groups, Twitter, SemiWiki and […]

Take a look at this graph – it’s obvious, isn’t it? FD-SOI is significantly cheaper, outdoes planar bulk and matches bulk FinFET in the performance/power ratio, and keeps the industry on track with Moore’s Law. This was part of a presentation by ST’s Joël Hartmann (EVP of Manufacturing and Process R&D, Embedded Processing Solutions) during Semi’s […]

Body-biasing design techniques, uniquely available in FD-SOI, have allowed STMicroelectronics and CEA-Leti to demonstrate a DSP that runs 10x faster than anything the industry’s seen before at ultra-low voltages (read press release here). In the mobile world (not to mention the IoT), the role of DSPs is becoming ever more important. All those things you […]